richardhutnik said:
If you want to argue about this core problem, can you answer what percentage of new jobs created require advanced skills and more training? There may be a shortage of workers on the higher end, but exactly what is being created to absord 60% of the population and get them work? And the issue of why also goes back to ALL jobs, even skilled ones. Why hire American IT workers, when you can get Indian IT workers for a much lower rate. Is there ANY profession not impacted by globalization, unless the jobs can't be moved, because they are physically tied to a certain area? |
Having worked as a software developer for many years now, I can with some level of authority that somewhere in the range of 80% of software projects that have been outsourced to India and/or China fail to meet the requirements, are low quality and unmaintainable, and demonstrate significant cost over-runs which make the project as expensive/more expensive than a project developed locally.
The reason for this is simple ... Developers in the western world are so lazy that we will put in many times as much effort into solving a problem once than repeatedly solving it over and over again, and as a result we steadily become more productive. Simply ask the average developer how much more productive frameworks and tools developed over the last decade have made them and how much less menial work they do to understand this. In contrast, the firms that you outsource work to are paid typically based on time and materials and there really isn't much incentive to be all that efficient; and (on top of this) the cost of managing a product developed in a different time zone in a different company often with language and cultural differences is significant.
Beyond this, the enitre nature of the industry is changing and we're moving away from large companies building their own widgets that they assemble into gigantic applications that monopolize a market to one where small companies share widgets and produce small applications in a highly competitive market. This change has made it impractical to "throw more developers" at a problem, and you need a handful of quality developers who can produce a solid product. While this would imply that we need fewer developers the opposite is true being that the number of projects that can be developed is unbounded being that you only need to focus on a viable niche that hasn't be saturated.
Similar changes are happening in several industies like the news and entertainment industries, but even clothing is changing. Today there are websites devoted to printing t-shirts with designs on them that were submitted by users and we aren't that far away from having tens of thousands of individuals/small companies making money as t-shirt designers.
We would be in a much better place if we just accepted that we're not going to be "manufacturing the t-shirt" or even "printing the design on the t-shirt" and realize that we will need to be the ones who "design the t-shirt and make the graphics that are displayed on it" and focus on royalties from intectual labour rather than wages from physical labour.
